Space: 1999 is a British science-fiction television programme that ran for two series from 1975 to 1977. In the opening episode, set in the year 1999, nuclear waste stored on the Moon's far side explodes, knocking the Moon out of orbit and sending it, as well as the 311 inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, hurtling uncontrollably into space. Against all the expectations, the Moonbase crew was surviving and living their Space Odyssey in full sustainability producing energy, propellants, food, breathing air by exploiting the lunar resources.

The Space: 1999 sci-fi fiction seems going to be real in the next future, through the NASA-Artemis program. One of its basic strategy is to make winning the in situ resources utilization approach (ISRU) by focusing on how to process Lunar soil (regolith-a complex mixture of oxides) by using already terrestrial developed advanced technologies for extracting pure elements (i.e. Si, Al, Mg, Fe, Ti, etc.), to produce breathing air, growing plants, and whatever sustain Moon habitants in such extreme conditions, e.g. building materials, screens against radiations, etc. Under a great ISRU-focus is also the “space junk” mainly consisting of light weight alloys based on Al, Si and Ti.

A preliminary investigation on using lunar soil (regolith) properly combined/processed with the abovementioned alloys for fabricating composites feasible as building/functional materials will be introduced in this paper. In particular, as an example, preliminary results obtained by interactions tests between liquid Al7075/DNA-1 regolith simulant will be shown and discussed.

Figure 1. Al7075/DNA-Regolith sample: a) SEM image after b) wetting experiment performed by the sessile drop method under a vacuum of Ptot = 10-4 Pa at T = 1100°C.